(December 13, 2008 at 4:18 pm)Tiberius Wrote: (In response to the original post)
Hmmm. To be honest it looks like you are redefining the words in order to make them support your argument. Determinism isn't simply an event that has a definite number of causes, and indeterminism isn't simply an event with an indefinite number of causes. Determinism and indeterminism can only apply on the basis that everything in reality is known, and therefore you could see cause and effect completely.
In fact this is why indeterminism and determinism are not branches of science but that of philosophy. Science has commented on indeterminism by saying that the principle of uncertainty (if true) means that aspects of nature are truly random and spontaneous, but this in no way confirms either.
There is a further paradox which sets indeterminism and determinism into philosophy; the fact that an indeterministic and deterministic universe would look exactly the same to an internal observer (i.e. us). There is literally no way we can "re-run" time to see which is true.
I think that modern science and philosophy are so tightly linked that you can barely separate them as different branches.
Anyway you can not separate physical events from causality because each event hapens within space-time coordinates being always a link
in a chain of previous timely and posterior timely events.
The current event is always the effect of a multitude of previous events and the cause of a multitude of posterior events.
There can not be a physical event born out of nothing and it can not disappear in nothing.(Except the God allmighty who does not exist).
The cause as well as the effect can be whether deterministic or indeterministic or dual in some interlinked combination.
Now,physical laws which express the cause /effect relation between events are never absolute but always limited within the frame of certain
conventional margins.
I'm technical minded so let's take as an example a simple law known from high school,namely the law of Ohm, which is expressed as
U/R=I ,where U is the electrical voltage measured in Volts,R is the resistance measured in Ohms and I is the current measured in Amperes.
Take a resistor of 10 ohms, plug it in your power outlet of 220 volts and inserting an Ammeter in this circuit you'll measure exactly 22 amps.
You can repeat the experiment a lot of times and you'll always obtain the same result.
Does that mean that we have here a deterministic relation?
Obviously -yes, but only to be satisfactory for a technician and not for a scientist.
The scientst will measure all three parametres with increasingly accurate apparatuses and he will find that the results are always slightly different.
The cause of it can be that the voltage fluctuates prmanently for an indefinite number of reasons and so does the resistence as a result of influence of the ambient temperature or humidity or changes in the strucure of it's material during the repeated experiment.
The scientist will therefore rewrite the simple law of Ohm to a more complex one related to a certain number of external conditions.
Now repeating the experiment for a big number of times he will obtain a statistical result which has at it's core the determinisic values derived from Ohms basic law and at it's margins, the more experiments he has performed the more indeterministic values.
If the scientist will try to measure the three paremetres down to the level of subatomical particles he will be trapped in the uncertainity principle.
This was a simple experiment but more of such experiments can be imagined in every domain of science especially in byology where al laws ,even the most basical ones are of a statisical structure.
I think that I have made myself a little bit clearer when speaking about the duality of determinism and indeterminism.
I see the importance of recognition of this aspect as a law of nature for the benefit of atheism for reasons I have already expressed in previos threads.
